The city at twilight was stained with the blood-like afterglow exhaled by the sinking sun. Taichi Tanaka climbed the slope of the residential area with the footsteps of a fugitive, the dying light at his back. A cold wind, a harbinger of winter, crept into the collar of his thin school uniform, mercilessly stroking his gaunt frame. But the chill Taichi felt was not merely the temperature.
Taichi was an average high school boy—at least, that was how the world saw him. Inside, however, he was collapsing, his form no longer holding its shape.
“Entrance exams, career paths, the future… it’s all trash.”
He kicked a pebble with all his might. He attended a prestigious preparatory school, living with his claws dug into the earth to avoid sliding off the rails of expectation laid by parents and teachers. But what lay at the end of those rails? A flimsy success, or the repetition of sterile routines. A claustrophobic sense of being trapped in a glass bottle, even his breathing managed.
For him, the existence of Keiko Sato, an older woman living nearby, was his only oxygen. Keiko was in her late thirties, single. She lived quietly in an old house, working as a translator, a step removed from the clamor of the world. To Taichi, her life was a symbol of freedom liberated from **gravity**, an elegance backed by deep intelligence.
“Auntie, can I come in?”
He rang the bell, and soon a familiar, composed voice replied. “Oh, Taichi-kun. Come in, it’s open.”
Opening the door, he was met with the warmth of a heater and the aroma of coffee, making him forget the winter chill. Keiko appeared from the end of the hallway, draped in a loose cashmere cardigan, her usual gentle smile behind her glasses. Her poise, the texture of her skin, and the sophisticated air of the room—all of it felt sacred to Taichi. It wasn’t so much that he wanted to be her; rather, a murky longing to become part of her “peaceful system” scorched his chest.
“What’s wrong, so formal all of a sudden? You look pale.”
Keiko’s soft voice unraveled Taichi’s rigid heart.
“Uh, no real reason, I’m just a bit tired lately… I thought talking to you might cheer me up.”
Taichi spoke a childish, transparent lie that made him want to gag. Truthfully, he didn’t know if he wanted to stain her “peace” or destroy himself along with it. He just needed an indulgence to stay in this place.
“That’s lovely to hear. I was just about to make some tea. Would you like some?”
Keiko disappeared into the kitchen with light steps. Left alone, Taichi sank into the deep sofa. Foreign books lining the walls, a well-used desk, orderly translation materials—each a piece of the established person known as “Keiko Sato.” Suddenly, his eye caught a piece of paper, out of place and ancient-looking, sitting next to a paperweight on the edge of the desk.
“What’s… this?”
Drawn to it, Taichi stood and took the paper in his hand. The texture was distinctly different from modern paper; it felt like yellowed, cracked parchment. On it was an eerie ink pattern, like squirming snakes or pulsing veins. As he stared, the symbols seemed to warp, creating the illusion of sucking in his consciousness.
“Oh, that? It’s just a charm,” Keiko said, returning with a tray of herb tea. She laughed with a look that was half-troubled, half-amused. “A friend I’ve known for a long time gave it to me as a joke. She has… unusual hobbies.”
“A charm…?” Taichi’s finger traced the cold pattern on the paper.
“Yes. You write your wish on the paper and recite it together in front of a mirror. But I never thought it would actually work. I haven’t even tried it.”
Those words acted as gasoline on the sparks of “frenzy” smoldering within Taichi. He wanted to become someone other than himself. He wanted to shed the suffocating skin of “Taichi Tanaka” and escape into her world, a world without **gravity**. He affected a joking tone, but his eyes held an inescapable “hunger.”
“Can I try it? I’ve always been so envious of your life. Even for just a day, I want to experience being in each other’s shoes. Being a high schooler is exhausting.”
Keiko faltered for a moment. But perhaps a dangerous curiosity, akin to a maternal instinct, stirred at Taichi’s desperate gaze—the look of someone screaming from the edge of a cliff.
“…Hehe, well, I suppose for one day wouldn’t hurt. Maybe I’ll go back to being a high schooler and get a crepe after school.”
She thought it was a joke. She never dreamed it was an invitation to an irreversible “descent.”
The two stood before a massive three-way mirror that reached from floor to ceiling. On the parchment, Taichi’s trembling hand wrote the word: “Transference.”
“Ready, Taichi-kun? In sync now.”
Keiko took Taichi’s hand. The sensation was soft and warm, uniquely feminine. Taichi wished intensely to make that warmth his own forever. Their voices overlapped toward the mirror. The moment they spun the nonsensical syllables written on the paper, a sudden pressure seized them, as if the air in the room had become a vacuum.
“…Ngh!”
His vision was swallowed by a violent white light; the three-way mirror let out a rhythmic, warping creak. Taichi’s self-awareness was forcibly stripped from its shell, as if placed in a high-speed centrifuge, and sucked into the adjacent “unknown **mass**” with terrifying gravitational pull. The sound of bones grinding. The sensation of cells being rearranged.
Then, blackout. Everything in the world Taichi Tanaka had protected collapsed with a roar.
===
“…Ngh… ah… aah…”
The first thing Taichi felt as he surfaced from the darkness was a violent, overwhelming **weight**. His body was being crushed by gravity with a **density** and **mass** he had never experienced. When he struck his knees and crawled on the floor, his palms met a damp, soft cushion of flesh unlike anything he had ever felt.
“This… what is this…?”
The voice that vibrated his throat was a moist, composed female tenor that made him doubt his own ears. Taichi checked his new “body” with trembling hands. First, the chest. A heavy, substantial protrusion that blocked his vision just by looking down. The underwire of a bra dug into his ribs, impeding his breath. Then the waist. The inner thighs pressed together, the unique sensation of fabric rubbing against fabric. And with every movement, the flesh of his entire body wobbled. It was the opposite of a trained high school boy’s frame; it was the soft, sagging, yet intensely present “flesh of a middle-aged woman.”
“It really… it really happened.”
Taichi (within Keiko) looked up at the three-way mirror as if crawling out of a pit. The “beautiful Keiko Sato” he had admired was not there. Reflected in the mirror was the raw, unmasked reality of a body in its late thirties under the harsh lights. Fine lines at the corners of the eyes, cheeks beginning to sag under gravity, dull skin beneath the makeup. It was the vivid onset of “aging” that instantly shattered his fantasy of the “free adult woman.”
Yet, Taichi felt not terror, but an inexplicable mania at the sight.
“This is her body… Whoa, incredible… It’s really a woman. All the way inside.”
He obsessively fumbled with the flesh through Keiko’s clothes. A sensation of sinking into a bottomless softness. The fact that he had shed the clean, hard shell of a man and was now submerged in this heavy, murky “marsh of meat” filled his brain with an abnormal euphoria.
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